It became a problem when everyone and their sister started needing to know what kinds of kinks I'm into just to sell me dish detergent.
I've been predicting for a while now that sites would fall back to the old television show model "RockAuto presents MustangForums.com" or something to that effect.
Instead, we get a dancing Albert Einstein begging us to take IQ tests.
The flip-side of this is that I’ve noticed that YouTube shows me PSAs from my own municipal government (“there’s an election soon” ads, “we’re building a new piece of civil infrastructure” ads, etc.) I actually kind of like that; I don’t have cable, so it’s not like I would see them anywhere else.
The entirely-static ads model does work when the consumption of the media is entwined with the consumption of the advertised brands, though. For example, a podcast can certainly advertise its own tour, since—given that you’re listening to the podcast—you likely want to see the podcaster speak in person, even if you can’t make it there.
Or, of course, if a (global) website is just advertising another (global) website. The NYT can advertise Amazon just fine.
We fully control and host our static ads and try to keep them high quality, so I've decided that minimally using IP to loosely serve a more relevant ad is okay. MaxMind offers a downloadable Geo IP database that we use to do this and are not needing a 3rd party service for this.
The upside for the user is that location and whatever the one site is able to determine about the user is all that can be shared. If the user hasn't logged in with their real name - that probably isn't much.
So instead of one ad being enough to pay for your content, you have to fill your website with banner ads, embedded ads, scroll over ads, animated ads, etc etc.
It's a slippery slope, more people use adblockers causing content creators to add more advertisements to generate the same amount of income. More people are bothered by the increase in ads, and download adblockers themselves. Rinse and repeat until ad supported content is unrealistic for all but the biggest of websites.
And I'm pretty sure even checking location is controversial. I've at least seen it included as part of tracking in the past.
That's still possible with static ads. The server can simply lookup your country from your IP address and serve the relevant ad, without tracking you at all.
I don't have cable, either, but I do have a pair of rabbit ears to keep up with local news via OTA broadcasts.
We post about office design and our ads are primarily for office furniture or other services related to the industry. We also self-host the ads which are non-animated jpgs and sell them without using any ad networks.
What you describe works well for us :)
I'm very interested in learning more...
People seem to have forgotten that users are most likely to be interested in what they are currently reading, because it is what their mind is currently focused on.
Because our content is so specific, ads which are relevant to the content end up targeting the user because you wouldn't be spending time on the site unless you care about the content.
It definitely takes time and work to develop and maintain relationships, but we also get to keep 100% of the revenue. In some ways we've just decided that ownership of the relationship and process is more important than being able to quickly slap some Adsense code up on the site.
That said, we also used Adsense early on, but have been doing this for ~5 years.
Minimal work involved. A bunch of emails back and forth, where we tell them our ad size if they provide an image. Or they provide a logo and we manually ad the text if they aren't technical enough to provide a custom image.
We also sell the space per month as opposed to based on impressions or clicks so it makes it a little more straightforward.
A couple things:
1. It facilitates a world in which only large content providers, who can afford to individually sell ads to advertisers, to exist.
There's a lot of overhead to ad sales and individual companies do not want to work with 1,000,000 providers, they want to work with 10-100.
2. It's substantially less efficient and only works for brand advertising or mass-market direct-response advertising.
One of the greatest things that Facebook and ad retargeting enabled was the rise of direct-response brands. Previously if you were selling a niche product - and most larger brands started out with a niche product - it was very difficult to reach an early audience who would be interested in purchasing your product. Facebook and Google flipped this on it's head, enabling millions of businesses to more efficiently reach customers. Facebook alone made the direct-to-consumer brand explosion we've seen over the last 10 years possible.
I am quite content to block these sorts of adverts and I'm not worried by the site's loss of revenue. I am not responsible for their slimy choice in business model.
Let's get back to context based adverts like DuckDuckGo use. There was no need for the internet to take this path - it only did so to rapidly monetise after the dot-com bust blew their VC funded rapid growth plans out of the water.
No need, aside from the trillions of dollars of economic value it created and hundreds of thousands of previously impossible businesses it created.